Everything starts at zero
You have to come up. Everything has to come up.
Everything is a struggle. You start from the bottom working to the top.
None of this is the 100% I pictured. But none of it is zero either.
It moved, and that is all that matters.
My Story
I grew up in Japan, and until my late teens, Japan was the only world I knew. I wanted to see more of it, and I wanted to play basketball at a higher level. So at the start of my junior year of high school, I moved to Oklahoma to attend high school in the U.S.
I arrived speaking zero English, in a place where I did not know a single person. I wasn’t there as a sheltered exchange student. I sat in the same classes as everyone else and joined the basketball team. Communicating with people, keeping up in class, learning English, training for basketball. I built all of it from the ground up, every single day.
From there, I attended Central Christian College in Kansas before transferring to San Diego State University, where I studied Business Management, influenced in part by watching my father run his own company back in Japan. The transfer process is where most Japanese students get stuck, and I walked through every step of it myself.
After graduating, I started my career in Los Angeles. I relocated to West Virginia, and a year later moved back to Los Angeles. I worked under American managers, and I managed people who had come from other countries. I lived the American side of both worlds, as a student and as a working professional.
By 2022, I had spent exactly 17 years in the United States. That was the same number of years I had spent growing up in Japan. That balance felt meaningful, and it felt like the right time to bring everything I had learned back home. I settled in Fukuoka, where I’ve been based ever since, building this next chapter of my career in Japan.
Those 17 years were not all smooth. In 2014, contact during a game completely fractured my left forearm. A few years later I broke the same spot the same way, and the arm alone has taken three surgeries. After that came lower-back pain, shoulder and hip problems, sciatica, and, once I was back in Japan, a meniscus injury. Every time I fought my way back and my body finally felt stable, something else would break down.
Turn every setback into a chance to improve.
What matters isn’t never falling down, it’s getting back up again and again. I’m about 172 cm, hardly built for dunking. I still put in the rehab and the training, brick by brick, and I’m still chasing dunks today. I write about that process on the jump training page.
Building a career, starting a business, learning a language: to me it all works the same way. Nothing goes up all at once.
That is the mindset I bring to the people I work with. Someone who cannot picture working in Japan yet. Someone starting Japanese from nothing. Someone who wants to go to the U.S. but cannot speak English yet. Someone rebuilding a body that keeps breaking down. I have stood at the start of every one of those roads, so the support I offer comes from a road I actually walked.
Who I work with
Profile
- From
- Fukuoka, Japan
- In the U.S.
- 17 years (2005–2022)
- Languages
- Japanese (native), English (native)
- Education
- San Diego State University, Business Management
- Height
- 172 cm
- Weight
- 68 kg
- Hobbies
- Strength training, basketball, yoga, gardening, coffee, investing
Take the step outside where you are now.
Looking for people to work with
Running the meetup · Overseas customer support · Social media · Site and articles · Tour guide in Fukuoka